High-Performance Democratic Socialism

──The emergence of organizing principles for a new society within the modern capitalist enterprise──

Abstract

Confronted by so much unnecessary suffering and destruction around us, scholars have an obligation to contribute to efforts to repair the world. We must then decide what model of a better world should guide these efforts Among the competing models, I focus on democratic socialism—a planned economy under socialized ownership. Large-scale experiments with socialism to date have not been successful in meeting economic and social needs, but nor were they very democratic. I argue that the organizing principles that would undergird a genuinely democratic form of socialism that meets our economic and social needs are emerging in some of our leading corporations. In order to stabilize and generalize this emergent organizational model, these same principles could be applied at the societal level.